The cutting floor of a typical meat packaging facility may produce meat products representing a value of several hundred million dollars each year. The value of the meat products that are produced is dependent on the way the animal carcasses are divided into primals and on the way the primals are trimmed of fat, skin and extraneous portions. The primals of a hog carcass are the shoulder (which includes the boston butt and the picnic), loin, ham, belly, and ribs. Cutting floor operations, if monitored at all, have typically been monitored on the basis of total daily production of various primals.
In commercial meat packing operations, animals, such as hogs, are slaughtered, bled, skinned, eviscerated, and the resulting carcass is then cut into halves before it is chilled. The carcasses are typically suspended from an overhead rail and are moved by a conveyor on the rail. The carcasses are then placed on a table and sent down a conveyor to a chop saw where the carcass is broken or cut at a pre-determined point between the loin portion and the shoulder portion. After the carcass is broken, the loin portion is either sent down a first line where the bones will remain in the loin or sent down a second line where the bones are removed.
A loin that is boned becomes a boneless loin. A loin that is not boned becomes a bone-in loin. A loin that is not boned is commonly referred to on the processing floor as a boxed loin.
Once the decision to bone or box the loin of the carcass has been made, the carcasses are broken between the shoulder and the loin area. This breaking point is typically located medially between the first and second rib (referred to as one and a half (1.5) ribs) from the head of the carcass. After each carcass is broken at 1.5 ribs, the carcasses that will be boned are sent down a separate line from the carcasses that will be boxed. The loins of the carcasses that go down the boning line are trimmed and the bones removed. Industry regulations require that certain muscle meat, primarily longissimus lumbarum, multifidus and spinalis dorsi complexus muscles be trimmed from the boneless pork loin. The trimmings that result from the boning process are used to make processed meat. Although the meat is not wasted, the meat would be significantly more valuable if it had remained attached to the shoulder portion instead of becoming trimmings.
Therefore, there is a need in the hog processing industry for a system and method of automatically adjusting the break point of a carcass, based on whether the loin of the carcasses will be boned or boxed to reduce the amount of the carcass which is processed as trimmings. There is a further need for such a system that operates without slowing down the speed of the processing line.